Today I’ve created a text file with the mnemonics from mandarinbanana.com to import in Anki. You can download the file here:
It is a tab-separated text file (compressed as zip, because it is 45 MB large uncompressed). This is what the import looks like:

# / name | What’s inside |
1 / hanzi | Just a single Chinese character, no HTML formatting. Example: 仍 |
2 / components | A simple line showing the components (example: 仍 = 乃 + 亻), followed by dictionary entries for the components and mnemonics for the components. |
3 / translations | Dictionary entries for the character and any mnemonics associated with the character. |
4 / images | Links to the comics associated with the character (no download option available so far) |
5 / appearances | A list of characters which use the root character as component (example: 仍 appears in 芿) |
6 / subtitles | Subtitles of the movies on mandarinbanana.com which contain the character. If you click on the sentence, it will open in the browser. |
7 / words | A list of CC-CEDICT dictionary entries for words the character appears in. |
There’s a lot of HTML formatting inside. Here’s what my styling section in Anki looks like (just as an example):
.card {
font-size: 16px;
text-align: center;
background: black;
color: white;
}
.mnemonics {
margin-top: 1em;
padding-top: 1em;
border-top: 1px solid gray;
}
table {
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
td {
border: 1px solid;
padding: 5px;
}
div {
margin: 5px;
}
.hanzi {
font-size: 2em;
font-family: "zenhei";
}
a {
text-decoration: none;
color: inherit;
}
ul {
list-style-type: none;
}
.mandarinbananalink a {
text-decoration: none;
color: orange;
}
img.mimage {
width: 200px;
background-color: white;
border: 1px solid white;
margin: 1px;
}
@font-face {
font-family: uming;
src: url('_UMingCN.ttf');
}
@font-face {
font-family: simfang;
src: url('_simfang.ttf');
}
@font-face {
font-family: zenhei;
src: url('_WenQuanYiZenHei.ttf');
}
.color1 {
color: orangered;
}
.color2 {
color: yellow;
}
.color3 {
color: limegreen;
}
.color4 {
color: dodgerblue;
}
Each mnemonic is followed by the author’s name (since all mnemonics are CC-BY). If you like to, you can hide this information by including the following code in your “Styling” section:
.authorattribution {
display: none;
}
I hope this is useful for you! If you need a different format let me know in the comments.
If you want to have a look how the file is generated, please head over to https://github.com/mattbenscho/MandarinBanana/blob/master/lib/tasks/output_anki.rake. It takes a few minutes for the script to run because there are so many database calls, which makes it difficult to, for example, post a link on mandarinbanana.com which always returns the latest collection. I’ll have to implement some caching mechanism first, but it’s one of the things I definitely want to do to complete the site.
Have fun learning Chinese!
Copyright information: all mnemonics CC-BY by the respective authors. Dictionary entries: CC-SA CC-CEDICT (www.mdbg.com).